"Ooh look, everyone, it's raining taxpayer money again. Isn't one lucky?"

The Royal Family is to be exempt from any cuts in public spending next year when its civil list funding is settled for the next 10 years, says The Guardian.

MPs will be powerless to reduce the £7.9m a year paid under the civil list because of an obscure deal struck between Buckingham Palace and the Treasury in 1972 when the current legislation governing royal finances was drawn up.  (Under the Tories, by any chance?  Oh yes – it was that old tosser, Edward Heath.)

Palace officials made clear earlier this summer that they are actually seeking a rise in the annual civil list payment to cover “increased costs” despite the fact that they currently have a £21m surplus in the reserves on the civil list account. Wonder what the interest is on that, ma’am…?

What a bunch of spongers.

Time to make them all redundant like a large number of us seem to be at the moment.

We hope they’ll have the good sense to go  before they’re pushed,  Oliver Cromwell-style.

We don’t need them and the morally disgusting values they represent.

It seems that politicians and the media are getting more concerned over a couple of schoolboy emails about Tory politicians than the death of innocent bystander Ian Tomlinson after a beating by the police at the G20 rally just two weeks ago.

As predicted by The Citizen, the police ‘investigation’ has turned into a sham and no doubt there will be a fudged outcome where nobody gets blamed and nobody is held responsible.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (about as independent as any of these jumped-up quangos are from their masters in government and the civil service) can’t seem to find any CCTV evidence of anything, even though millions of us have seen images on TV which cannot be disputed.   It has taken the IPCC several days even to get to this stage, when other investigations into excessive police violence – but where nobody actually died – were instigated within 24 hours.

It does no credit to the police force or the IPCC that while the offending police thugs have supposedly ‘stepped forward’, they don’t appear to have been decent or honest enough to own up to their violent beating of a British citizen going about his business, and which is highly likely to have been a direct cause of his death.

WE SAW what was done to Ian Tomlinson.
WE SAW at least one of the policemen removing his identification badge and covering has face with a balaclava before beating Mr Tomlinson.
WE SAW – in newspapers and on TV – the testimony of various independent witnesses to police attacks on the man.  People not involved in the protest rally. People from other countries with no axe to grind against the police.

People who – unlike our own policemen – have no reason to lie.

WHAT MORE DOES THE IPCC WANT?

We must not let the police off the hook on this. Nor let minor political squabbles get in the way of justice being done for this unfortunate man or for the violence which he suffered in the final hours of his life to go unpunished.

Government and the police need a clear message from us that police violence on innocent citizens exercising their democratic rights is simply not acceptable.

Please don’t let this case be swept away in a tide of indifference. We all need to stop this from becoming even more the norm than it is already.

IT COULD BE YOU – OR YOUR OWN SON OR DAUGHTER – NEXT TIME.

Never a rabid protester in the past, and never one to kick up much of a fuss in public…

An ordinary, middle-aged, working-class white male, wanting to try and change things for the better in my own small way.  After all, it’s a democracy we live in, isn’t it? Aren’t we supposed to be good citizens and participate in the decision-making process rather than sit at home in front of the telly, never voting and never taking part as full members of the society in which we live?

When it comes to the next General Election, they’ll be imploring us to vote and take part, maybe even collect us and give us a lift to the polling station to get our vote. They LIKE us to care about our country and get involved, don’t they? Or is that only when it suits them?

I arrived not long after midday, expecting a little bit of pushing and shoving and the odd police helmet knocked off,  and sensed there was a real mood of anticipation and just a little apprehension in the gathering crowd over what might happen if it all kicked off in the way suggested by the media over the past week or two.
Shades of Grosvenor Square in ’68,  Brixton in ’81 and all that – for those of you who remember.

But we’re now living in such a police state that you couldn’t get near the leading small core of marchers (for it was small – nowhere near the thousands I – and probably the cops – had expected).  Hordes of police and their vans, far too many for the numbers of people involved, had divided the crowd into manageable pockets, where they tamely looked on at a distance in each of the streets surrounding the Bank of England.

Some particularly nasty and aggressive constables got the nod from someone and immediately started shouting loudly and moving in a line towards us, forcing us back.  I had no idea why, as we were all just quiet onlookers trying to get a decent shot with our cameras and mobile phones.  No threat whatsoever.

In the few minutes of police shouting I got a bit of an adrenalin rush and quickly devised a plan of action if confronted with a snarling rozzer wielding a baton at my head:  keep to the edge, not the middle, don’t get hemmed in and caught up in the melee just in case the fuzz think you’re a middle-aged white terrorist and send in a snatch squad to take you out, Taser you and cart you off in a black maria or whatever they’re called these days (you probably can’t call them black any more and they’re a rather nice gunmetal grey, anyway).

But - as they said about Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ – nothing happened. Twice.
Fat chance of a bit of a rumble. I should have known.

No way through.
And no way out if you were in the core group.

Separated and segregated from the march and with no chance of any meaningful action, even if there were any brave souls to lead us out of the trenches and over the top.

And as if to rub salt in the wounds and make the frustration  worse, you could see those who were obviously bankers in their ‘dress-down’ gear (cashmere jumpers, Jermyn Street shirts, designer jeans and brown brogues or loafers), looking on with amusement in between deep conversations about the size of the bonuses you and I will be paying them this year.

It was tempting to find the nearest bucket of something brown and smelly to throw over them.

After two frustrating hours of trying to find a way into the middle and join my fellow citizens for a bit of concerted shouting and chanting, I gave up.

Every now and again some cheers rang out in the distance and you thought ‘this is it – it’s kicking off’… but it never did.

Apparently a couple of RBS windows got broken (which  belong to all of us anyway) but more importantly, several heads got bludgeoned by the government’s police thugs as we saw on the TV news later.

So that’s it. That’s the state… or should we say police state… of Britain today.

Screwed by politicians and bankers,  thousands of us made jobless, homeless and powerless,  and you can’t even do anything about it because the long and heavy-handed arm of the law will be brought in to keep you down under some trumped-up terrorism charge in the interests of national security.

Doesn’t feel like a democracy to me.

Like politicians you mean, David?   We agree.

It seems that companies would rather give jobs to foreigners without English language skills, to illegal immigrants who will keep their mouths shut about low pay, or to young people with no experience and a poor standard of education.
Our banks, shops, supermarkets, restaurants and other businesses are full of staff who can’t communicate properly because their first language isn’t English, or who are semi-literate with no social skills and couldn’t care less about good customer service.
But these cheap-to-employ and easy-to-sack staff don’t encourage us as customers to return and buy from the business again.
Is this why the country is in such a mess?  We know it’s to save money, cut costs and improve the ‘bottom line’… but ultimately it’s a short-term benefit and a false economy. Current employment laws on ageism are totally ineffective and need to be reinforced.  The trouble is, it’s hard to prove you’ve been discriminated against.
Government needs to act now
The over-50s have to adopt a different approach and it’s here that government can do something constructive.   Employers need better incentives to employ mature candidates (the ‘New Deal 50+’ scheme sounds like a good idea but doesn’t work), and the over-50s need grants and support to set up in business for themselves and employ others in the same boat.  At the moment there’s too much red tape and waffle, and not enough action.
The British Citizen aims to do something about this in the near future, so watch this space.

In the meantime, tell us about your experience of ageism in the workplace / employment market.  We’ll be publishing a ‘name and shame’ list of guilty employers and recruitment agencies who claim to have ‘lost’ your CV or application.

The following is an extract and summary of the proceedings against just ONE illegal immigrant, who was discovered in 1993 and it took FIFTEEN YEARS to decide he should be locked up, then released and then locked up again.   

The case of  Abu Qatada, aka Omar Mohammed Othman:

1. The appellant arrived in the United Kingdom on 16th September 1993 (when the Tories were in power) with his wife and three children on forged United Arab Emirates passports. He claimed asylum on arrival and was granted refugee status on 30th June 1994.
He was given four years leave to enter.

On 17th January 2001 the Secretary of State certified that he was a risk to national security and issued a notice of intention to deport.
The notice was not served at that time, because the appellant “went to ground“.

On 23rd October 2002 he was detained and issued with a certificate under section 21 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 and served with the notice of intention to deport.
He appealed against it.
His appeal was dismissed by SIAC on 8th March 2004.

He was released on “immigration bail” (?) on 11th March 2005 and on the following day served with a Control Order under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005.
On 11th August 2005, he was served with a fresh notice of intention to deport on the ground that his presence in the United Kingdom was “not conducive to the public good” and detained under immigration powers.

His appeal against the notice was dismissed by SIAC on 5th March 2007.
SIAC found that he was a threat to national security, principally on the ground that he encouraged other extremists to commit acts of terrorism by providing religious sanction for their deeds. He was found to have long standing associations with other terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. He was also found to have ready access to money and false documents for the purpose facilitating terrorism.

2. In April 2008, his appeal to the Court of Appeal was allowed, on safety on return grounds. He applied for bail.
On 8th May 2008 SIAC decided that, in principle, he should be admitted to bail on stringent terms, including a twenty two hour curfew and a full package of restrictions upon his ability to communicate with others.
At that date, the Court of Appeal had refused permission to the Secretary of State to appeal to the House of Lords.

An application for permission to the Appellate Committee was outstanding. The Commission accepted that the grounds upon which permission was sought were arguable, but that it could not simply ignore what had happened in the Court of Appeal. The fact that he had succeeded in his appeal was treated as of very great significance.
Nevertheless, the Commission accepted that the appellant represented a continuing and significant risk to national security and that there was a current and significant risk of absconding.
3. The appellant was released on 17th June 2008 to live at an address with his family in West London. On the morning of Saturday 8th November 2008, he was (finally!) detained at his home and taken to Belmarsh Prison.
The Secretary of State contends that the Commission should conclude that, if he was readmitted to bail, he would be “likely to break any condition on which he was released”, so that the Commission should direct that he be detained under paragraph 24(3) of Schedule 2 to the Immigration Act 1971.

Postscript:
The home secretary, Jacqui Smith (who?), said she was pleased that Qatada’s bail had been revoked:
“He poses a significant threat to our national security and I am pleased that he will be detained pending his deportation, which I’m working hard to secure.”
Qatada was taken back to Belmarsh prison in east London, but is expected to be moved to Long Lartin maximum security prison in the near future.

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE TO GET RID OF THIS MAN FOR GOOD?
ARE OUR LEGAL AND POLITICAL SYSTEMS SO INEPT THAT IT TAKES 15 YEARS TO GET NOWHERE WITH THIS?

…   and how much has it cost the taxpayer so far, ‘entertaining’ this parasite?

The situation beggars belief.      Petition your MP until something is done.